A serial sex offender who thought he had got away with a brutal rape after an innocent man was put behind bars is finally facing jail.

In one of Britain’s worst ever miscarriages of justice, Andrew Malkinson spent 17 years in jail after wrongly being convicted of pouncing on the woman and raping her on a motorway embankment in 2003.  

In fact her attacker was Paul Quinn, a hard-drinking divorced father-of-five who claims to have had consensual sex with hundreds of women as a young man.

Mr Malkinson finally succeeded in clearing his name in 2023 after new analysis of DNA taken from the victim’s clothing provided a one-in-a-billion match to a sample given by Quinn over a decade earlier.

Today jurors agreed that the 52-year-old former fence erector was the real rapist.

Quinn slumped forwards and sat with his head bowed after being found guilty of two counts of rape.

As he was led to the cells he made a thumbs-up gesture to relatives watching from the public gallery. 

However the trial has left police and prosecutors facing searching questions as to why mounting doubts about Mr Malkinson's conviction were not acted on sooner. 

In response, Mr Malkinson said he was 'content' that justice had finally been done - but said Quinn 'could have been caught a long time ago' had police done their properly.

'Instead, they wanted a quick conviction and I was a handy patsy forced to spend over 17 years in prison for his horrific crime,' he added.

'All those responsible for allowing this dangerous man to wander free whilst I was locked up must now be held to account.'

Meanwhile the rape victim - who cannot be named for legal reasons - said while she was 'very pleased' Quinn had finally been convicted, both she and Mr Malkinson had been 'robbed' of the lives they could have led.

And James Burley, who led the campaign to clear Mr Malkinson's name, said the 'grim reality' was that 'Paul Quinn could have been caught years ago'.

It can now be revealed that Quinn committed an indecent assault when he was just 12 years old.

Four years later, when he was 16, Quinn was convicted of two counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a 12-year-old girl.

Then at the age of 19 he was convicted of arson after setting fire to a wheelie bin outside the home of an ex-girlfriend while her two children were inside, receiving a two-year sentence. 

Other convictions from the 1990s including causing actual bodily harm, burglary and trespassing with loaded air gun. 

Jurors were not told that the reason Quinn’s DNA came to be sampled in 2012 was as part of a national police operation targeting convicted sex offenders.

However a series of blunders meant it was not matched to samples taken from the rape victim for another decade.

While Mr Malkinson endured a nightmarish incarceration wrongly labelled a sex offender, Quinn became a grandfather, split from his wife, moved to Devon and started a new relationship.

An independent judge-led inquiry into why Mr Malkinson was wrongly deprived of his freedom for almost two decades will now examine why it has taken so long to unmask the real attacker.

Meanwhile Greater Manchester Police face questions about their role in depriving an innocent man of his freedom and future. 

At Mr Malkinson's trial in 2004, the victim insisted she was ‘more than 100 per cent’ certain that he was her attacker.

But giving evidence at Quinn's trial last month, she revealed that when she saw Mr Malkinson in the dock, in reality she was 'unsure' whether he was her attacker.

However when she told police officers at court, they 'reassured' her that it was 'normal to have second thoughts', she said. 

Six serving or retired officers involved in the original investigation are under investigation for possible misconduct by the police watchdog, in one case potentially involving claims of perverting the course of justice.

Detectives now suspect Quinn - a 'very dangerous man' who was ‘probably hanging around waiting to see a lone female’ - may be responsible for other unsolved sex offences from his years in Salford.

They have been examining three unsolved stranger rapes between 2005 and 2010 in Swinton, Bolton and Salford. 

Senior investigating officer Detective Chief Superintendent Rebecca McKendrick said: 'We are alive to the possibility he may have offended on more than this one occasion, and so I encourage anyone with information or concerns relating to the details of this case to know they can approach us in confidence.'

Quinn was today convicted of two counts of rape as well as attempting to strangle the woman with intent to render her unconscious.

He was also convicted of GBH following a five-week trial at Manchester Crown Court but cleared of two alternative counts of indecent assault over the attack.

Quinn will be sentenced on June 5. 

After the verdicts, Mr Malkinson said: 'I am content that the right result has finally been achieved for the victim, myself and the public. 

'But the truth is that if the police had acted as they should have done, Paul Quinn could have been caught a long time ago. 

'Instead, they wanted a quick conviction and I was a handy patsy forced to spend over 17 years in prison for his horrific crime.'

He added: 'All those responsible for allowing this dangerous man to wander free whilst I was locked up must now be held to account.'

James Burley, who led the law charity APPEAL’s investigation into Mr Malkinson’s wrongful conviction, said: 'We welcome the conviction of the true perpetrator of this appalling crime for which Andrew Malkinson spent over 17 years wrongly imprisoned.

'However, the grim reality is that Paul Quinn could have been caught years ago and certainly back in 2012, when his DNA was uploaded to the national database. 

'By that point, the authorities had for some years had a searchable DNA profile recovered from the victim’s clothing which did not match Mr Malkinson. 

'Yet neither Greater Manchester Police nor the Criminal Cases Review Commission bothered to arrange a further search of the database until 2022, when APPEAL had presented further DNA evidence supporting Mr Malkinson’s innocence.

'As a consequence, Mr Malkinson spent a further 8 years wrongly imprisoned whilst a violent offender lived freely.'

Mr Burley called for periodic DNA searching as well as rules barring 'prosecutions based solely on unsupported eyewitness identification evidence' as well as greater transparency about the criminal histories of prosecution witnesses.

Mr Malkinson's current solicitor, Toby Wilton of Hickman & Rose, who represents him at the upcoming inquiry, said the outcome was 'justice very long delayed'.

'This trial further exposed how both the victim of this terrible crime and Mr Malkinson could have been spared years of pain and injustice but for failures by Greater Manchester Police, the CPS and the Criminal Cases Review Commission,' he added.

'Paul Quinn lived near to the scene of the crime. He matched the victim’s description of her attacker in number of important respects including - unlike Andrew Malkinson - having a local accent. 

'His ex-wife gave evidence that he had come home without his shirt on the night of the attack.

'But, as the court heard, within days the police were entirely focussed on prosecuting Mr Malkinson. 

'It also heard that the victim raised doubts to police about her identification of Mr Malkinson at the time.

'Paul Quinn’s DNA was discovered on samples taken from a key part of the victim’s clothing in 2007, by which time Mr Malkinson had been convicted. 

'His DNA was uploaded to the national database in 2012. 

'Yet it was only in 2022 - and following investigations by Mr Malkinson and Appeal - that the DNA was matched to Mr Quinn.

'The ongoing investigations into this appalling miscarriage of justice by the Andrew Malkinson Inquiry and the Independent Office for Police Conduct must be allowed to continue their vital work so that lessons can be learned and those responsible held to account.'

Following the jury's verdicts, which came after approximately 15 hours of deliberations, Assistant Chief Constable Steph Parker of Greater Manchester Police apologised 'sincerely and unreservedly' to both Mr Malkinson and the rape victim.

'Paul Quinn is a dangerous man,' she added. 

'He is the one responsible for this horrific attack, and he has known it all along for more than 20 years. 

'The harm he has done to the victim and the cowardice of watching the wrong man go to prison for his crime is unforgivable.'

ACC Parker said Mr Malkinson’s wrongful conviction and imprisonment were ‘clearly a failing of Greater Manchester Police and the wider criminal justice system’ which 'cannot happen again'.

She said questions about why the partial DNA profile obtained in 2007 was not followed up more thoroughly by detectives at the time, and the destruction by the force of clothing worn by the victim in 2016, were matters for the twin inquiries.

The attack took place in the early hours of Saturday July 19, 2003 as a woman in her thirties was walking home through Salford, Greater Manchester.

She heard ‘footsteps’, she told the jury in the original trial, then to her terror ‘felt this force from behind’ as she was ‘grabbed’.

Tearfully, she told how she desperately tried to fight off her attacker as he strangled her. 

Before losing consciousness, she scratched his face with such force that it caused the nail on the middle finger of her left hand to snap off.

In the brutal attack she suffered a fractured cheekbone and swollen eye. One nipple had been partially severed by a bite.

After coming round, she gave police a detailed description of her attacker.

He was ‘tanned’, of ‘muscular build’, had a ‘shiny, hairless chest’ and was wearing a white shirt ‘completely unbuttoned down the front’.

It immediately made local officers think of Mr Malkinson, who had recently moved to Salford to work as a security guard at a shopping centre.

Even though he had no sign of a scratch when they spoke to him a day after the attack – and was from Grimsby, contrary to the victim’s account of her attacker having a Bolton accent – he quickly became the prime suspect.

Tests on a DNA sample were inconclusive, but the victim and a passer-by both picked Mr Malkinson out in a digital identification parade.

He was convicted by majority verdicts based on the accounts of eye witnesses and jailed for life with a minimum term of seven years.

However Mr Malkinson refused to accept his guilt, making two unsuccessful attempts to have his case examined by the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which examines potential miscarriages of justice.

It meant he was denied parole, enduring a nightmarish incarceration while wrongly labelled a sex offender.

Prison shattered Mr Malkinson’s physical and mental health and on many occasions the 60-year-old contemplated killing himself.

Yet as far back as 2007, new analysis of DNA samples taken from the victim’s clothing showed it matched neither Mr Malkinson nor her then partner.

The partial profile came from saliva on her vest top, just above where she sustained a bite to her nipple.

At this point, ‘alarm bells’ about the safety of Mr Malkinson’s conviction ought to have rung, Quinn's trial heard.

But after Greater Manchester Police’s cold case unit unsuccessfully tried to find a match for the new DNA sample, work came to an end.

Crucially, at that stage it was not placed on the national database. 

In 2012, the year that police took a sample from Quinn, the CCRC refused to order further DNA testing - partly on the grounds of cost, plus the belief it would not be sufficient to reverse Mr Malkinson's conviction.

A damning report into the agency’s handling of Mr Malkinson’s case later branded the decision ‘very unsatisfactory’ given that everyone involved knew he continued to protest his innocence.

Senior barrister Chris Henley KC said efforts to identify whose DNA it was should instead have been ‘redoubled’.

In 2018 it was left to Mr Malkinson’s lawyers to go back to the CCRC with a second application.

By now, for reasons which have yet to be explained, police had destroyed clothing worn by the victim when she was raped.

After reviewing the case, in 2020 it again declined to refer the case to the Court of Appeal.

Despite advances in technology, no attempt was made to see if a new potential match could be found.

The following year Mr Malkinson made a third application to the CCRC – one which would ultimately lead to his conviction being quashed by the Court of Appeal in July 2023.

It focused on new DNA findings commissioned by Mr Malkinson’s lawyers, as well as the failure of GMP to disclose the background of eye witnesses Michael Seward and Beverley Craig.

While the trial judge back in 2004 had stressed that they were of good character, evidence uncovered by campaigners showed that the couple had multiple criminal convictions for dishonesty.

By 2022 his campaign to be exonerated was gathering pace, with media reports for the first time making it public that DNA was pointing to a different culprit.

Quinn had meanwhile separated from his wife and begun a new life over 200 miles away from Salford with a new partner in Devon, working as a delivery driver.

He would later tell police that his only recollection was that somebody 'got done' for the 2003.

However his browsing history – uncovered by police following his arrest – told a different story.

No doubt increasingly paranoid that his luck was finally running out, Quinn searched for news about the campaign, as well as information about how long police retain people’s DNA.

This, prosecutor John Price KC argued, was because he was by now 'expecting the police to come calling' because he assumed his DNA would be traced. 

In October 2022, the re-worked DNA profile from stored samples taken from the victim’s vest top was loaded onto the national database.

It duly matched the sample Quinn had given back in 2012.

Arrested in December of that year, Quinn claimed he could not possibly recall all the hundreds of women he claimed to have slept with during that period of his life.

Asked how his DNA was a one-in-a-billion match to the sample found on the victim's top, Quinn told detectives: 'I don't know. 

'I really don't know. Because I did not do this offence.

'There has got to be some explanation I can't think of.

'We used to go out partying, we did have a lot of female friends...

'We never seemed to have a night out where we didn't end up at a house party or we'd cop off with girls.

'Even during my work... I used to do landscape fencing... we used to always meet girls.' 

If there was DNA, he told them, then it must have come from consensual sex with the victim, who he couldn’t remember.

However crucial evidence came from his ex-wife Catherine who clearly remembered the day of the ‘dreadful’ rape, which sent shockwaves through the local community.

She told police how on July 19, 2003 he had come home from a night out in nearby Farnworth without his shirt – something she noticed as she always did his laundry.

‘I asked Paul where his shirt was and he said he didn’t know,’ she said.

Her husband sweated heavily in summer and was in the habit of either ‘unbuttoning his shirt all the way undone or taking it off completely’ while dancing, she said.

Mrs Quinn recalled that on hearing about the rape, she told her then husband: ‘You better hope that they don’t find your shirt anywhere near there.’

Another key piece of information she provided was about his bizarre chest hair grooming routine.

The victim recalled her attacker’s chest being ‘shiny’ and ‘hairless’, whereas social media pictures show Quinn’s was covered in thick hair.

His ex-wife told police he would shave it every summer as it became ‘itchy’ in warmer weather, leaving it ‘completely bald’.

As for the victim, during Mr Malkinson's trial, she said she was ‘more than 100 per cent’ certain that she had correctly identified him as her attacker.

But giving evidence at Quinn’s trial, she dramatically testified that she had in fact had doubts when she saw Mr Malkinson in court – and had told police about them at the time.

Interviewed by police ahead of Quinn’s trial, the victim said she did not know the name of the officer she told of her doubts, only that she knew him as ‘The Don… because he looked Italian’.

Giving evidence, Quinn accepted he had never met the victim and said he did not know how his DNA came to be on her victim’s clothing.

He denied raping her.

Questioned about his online searches, he said he had always been interested in ‘true crime’ programmes and had researched DNA out of ‘inquisitiveness’.

After today's verdicts, Karen Tonge of the Crown Prosecution Service said: 'At the heart of this case is a victim who has waited more than 20 years for justice.

'Today's result sends a clear message that the passage of time will never stop the CPS from fighting to secure justice for all victims of rape and serious sexual offences.

'Paul Quinn carried out an appalling and brutal attack on a lone young woman in broad daylight, with no thought for the devastating impact his crimes would have on her.

'Quinn compounded her suffering when he stood by while an innocent man was wrongly convicted of his crimes.

'I hope today’s result provides some closure for the victim. 

'It is a testament to her strength and her character, and her unwavering support undoubtedly contributed to Quinn's conviction.'

Mr Malkinson himself did not give evidence in Quinn’s trial after the prosecution said he was ‘unfit to be a witness due to his mental condition’.

He has continued to fight for those responsible for his wrongful conviction to be held accountable.

Following widespread criticism, the head of the CCRC was forced to quit.

An independent inquiry into the case is under way, while the Independent Office for Police Conduct is investigating GMP.

Five retired officers - one of whom still works for the force in a civilian role - are under investigation for potential gross misconduct, and one serving officer for possible misconduct.

One of the former officers is also under criminal investigation for potential misconduct in public office and perverting the course of justice.

However its work speaking to key players has been delayed by the need to avoid jeopardising Quinn’s trial, with many elements of the probe ‘paused’.

IOPC director Amanda Rowe said: ‘The miscarriage of justice that led to Andrew Malkinson being jailed for 17 years – one of the worst we have ever seen in this country – has had a profound impact on the lives of many people.

‘That is why our investigation – which is entirely independent of the police – is so important, to understand the role of Greater Manchester Police in what happened.’

In an update on the investigation, she said it was a ‘hugely complex and time-consuming process’ which aimed to ‘get Mr Malkinson the answers he deserves’ and restore ‘public confidence’ that ‘lessons will be learned’.

Mr Malkinson has so far received a six-figure compensation payout – but has battled to force the Government to raise the limit for sums payable for miscarriages of justice from £1 million to £1.3 million.